Natural Language In Business Process Models

Natural language is one of the most important means of human communication. It enables us to express our will, to exchange thoughts and to document our knowledge in written sources. Owing to its substantial role in many facets of human life, technology for automatically analyzing and processing natural language has recently become increasingly important. In fact, natural language processing tools have paved the way for entirely new business opportunities. The goal of this book is to facilitate the automatic analysis of natural language in process models and to employ this analysis for assisting process model stakeholders. Therefore, a technique is defined that automatically recognizes and annotates process model element labels. In addition, this technique is leveraged to support organizations in effectively utilizing their process models in various ways. The book is organized into seven chapters. It starts with an overview of business process management and linguistics and continues with conceptual contributions on parsing and annotating process model elements, with the detection and correction of process model guideline violations, with the generation of natural language from process models and finally ends with the derivation of service candidates from process models.

In the past decades, organizations had to face numerous challenges due to intensifying globalization, shorter innovation cycles and growing IT support. Business process management is seen as a comprehensive approach to address these challenges. For this purpose, business process models are increasingly utilized to document and redesign relevant parts of the organization's business operations. Since organizations tend to have a huge number of such models, analysis techniques are required that ensure the quality of these process models in an automatic fashion. The goal of this doctoral thesis is the development of model refactoring techniques by integrating and applying concepts from the three main branches of theoretical linguistics: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The syntactical refactoring technique addresses linguistic issues that arise by expressing process behavior with natural language. The semantic refactoring technique reworks terminology with overlapping and synonymous meaning. The pragmatic refactoring technique provides recommendations for incompletely specified process models. All of the presented techniques have been evaluated with real-world process model repositories from various industries to demonstrate their applicability and efficiency.

Driven by the need for a closer alignment of business and IT requirements, the role of business process models in the development of enterprise software systems has increased continuously. Similar to other software artifacts, process models are developed and refined in team environments by several stakeholders, resulting in different versions. These versions need to be merged in order to obtain an integrated process model. Existing solutions to this basic problem in the field of software configuration management are mainly limited to textual documents, e.g., source code. This monograph presents a generally applicable framework for process model change management, which provides easy-to-use comparison and merging capabilities for the integration of different process model versions. The framework supports popular modeling languages such as BPMN, BPEL, or UML Activity Diagrams. Differences between process models are represented in terms of intuitive, high-level change operations. Equipped with a sophisticated analysis of dependencies and a semantic-aware computation of conflicts between differences, the framework constitutes a comprehensive and practically usable solution for process model change management in the model-driven development of enterprise software systems.

This book contains the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Business Process Modeling, Development and Support, BPMDS 2016, and the 21st International Conference on Exploring Modeling Methods for Systems Analysis and Design, EMMSAD 2016, held together with the 28th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2016) in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in June 2016. The focus theme for BPMDS 2016 papers was ”Business Processes in a Connected World”, for which three subthemes were identified: business processes for connecting people, connecting intelligent objects to business processes and connecting information/data/knowledge to business processes. The 17 full and 1 short paper accepted for BPMDS were selected from 48 submissions and are grouped into topical sections on process execution support; improving usability of process models; social and human perspectives; new directions in process modeling; consistency, correctness and compliance; process and data mining; and process variability. The intention of EMMSAD is to solicit papers related to the field of information systems analysis and design including numerous information modeling methods and notations that are typically evolving. These ongoing changes significantly impact the way information systems, enterprises, and business processes are being analyzed and designed in practice. The 12 full papers accepted for EMMSAD were chosen from 19 submissions and are grouped into topical sections on fundamental issues in modeling; requirements and regulations; enterprise and software ecosystem modeling; information and process model quality; meta-modeling and domain specific modeling and model composition; and modeling of architecture and design.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of 12 international workshops held in Tallinn, Estonia, in conjunction with the 10th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2012, in September 2012. The 12 workshops comprised Adaptive Case Management and Other Non-Workflow Approaches to BPM (ACM 2012), Business Process Design (BPD 2012), Business Process Intelligence (BPI 2012), Business Process Management and Social Software (BPMS2 2012), Data- and Artifact-Centric BPM (DAB 2012), Event-Driven Business Process Management (edBPM 2012), Empirical Research in Business Process Management (ER-BPM 2012), Process Model Collections (PMC 2012), Process-Aware Logistics Systems (PALS 2012), Reuse in Business Process Management (rBPM 2012), Security in Business Processes (SBP 2012), and Theory and Applications of Process Visualization (TAProViz 2012). The 56 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 141 submissions.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2015, held in Innsbruck, Austria, in August/September 2015. The 21 regular papers, 7 short papers and 2 inductrial papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 125 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on runtime process management, process modeling, process modeling discovery, business process models and analytics, BPM in industry, process compliance and deviations, energing and practical areas of BPM, and process monitoring.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of nine international workshops held in Beijing, China, in conjunction with the 11th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2013, in August 2013. The nine workshops comprised Business Process Intelligence (BPI 2013), Business Process Management and Social Software (BPMS2 2013), Data- and Artifact-Centric BPM (DAB 2013), Decision Mining and Modeling for Business Processes (DeMiMoP 2013), Emerging Topics in Business Process Management (ETBPM 2013), Process-Aware Logistics Systems (PALS 2013), Process Model Collections: Management and Reuse (PMC-MR 2013), Security in Business Processes (SBP 2013) and Theory and Applications of Process Visualization (TAProViz 2013). The 38 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 74 submissions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of ten international workshops held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in conjunction with the 12th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2014, in September 2014. The ten workshops comprised Process-oriented Information Systems in Healthcare (ProHealth 2014), Security in Business Processes (SBP 2014), Process Model Collections: Management and Reuse (PMC-MR 2014), Business Processes in Collective Adaptive Systems (BPCAS 2014), Data- and Artifact-centric BPM (DAB 2014), Business Process Intelligence (BPI 2014), Business Process Management in the Cloud (BPMC 2014), Theory and Applications of Process Visualization (TaProViz 2014), Business Process Management and Social Software (BPMS2 2014) and Decision Mining and Modeling for Business Processes (DeMiMoP 2014). The 38 revised full and eight short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 84 submissions. In addition, six short papers resulting from the Doctoral Consortium at BPM 2014 are included in this book.